Michael Pollak:
Now that you bring it up, Partition really puts Putin's comment about the Soviet Union's break-up being "the greatest geo-political disaster of the last century" in proper perspective. Partition caused a million deaths, many of them in truly horrible ways, plus countless rapes and beatings and 20 million refugees. The Soviet Union's break-up was a bad thing, but not in the same class. (Heck, come to think of it, it wasn't even the worst geo-political disaster of the last 15 years in Europe. Yugoslavia was.)
Michael
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Once again, Putin was mistranslated. Russian doesn't even have articles. Here's what the translation says on the Kremlin's website: "Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
The civil wars in Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Moldova and Chechnya are all direct results of the USSR's collapse. The body count may well be upwards of a million.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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